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Clifford D. Simak Quotes

1904–1988 United States

Clifford Donald Simak (3 August 1904 – 25 April 1988) was an American science fiction writer, and a winner of several Hugo and Nebula awards.

United States
Editors
Novelists
Science fiction authors
Short story writers

Also known as: Simak, Simak, Clifford D.

Random Clifford D. Simak quote

90 quotes

These are the stories the Dogs tell, when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north.

City (1952)

There was so much knowledge in the galaxy and he knew so little of it, understood so little of the little that he knew.

Way Station (1963)

The wolf was smiling at him, and he had never known that a wolf could smile.

Highway of Eternity (1986)

How strange it is, he thought, how so many senseless things shape our destiny.

Way Station (1963)

He had dabbled in a thing which he had not understood. And had, furthermore, committed that greater sin of thinking that he did understand.

Way Station (1963)

Before Man goes to the stars he should learn how to live on Earth.

Time and Again (1951)

They know there's something strange, but don't know what it is.

Highway of Eternity (1986)

We are all genetic brothers. The chain of life, tracing back to that primordial day of life's beginning, is unbroken...

Interview in Speaking of Science Fiction: The Paul Walker Interviews (1978)

It would be three-dimensional chess with a million billion squares and a million pieces, and with the rules changing ever move.

Time and Again (1951)

I’m just a propagandist and a propagandist doesn’t have to know what he is talking about, just so he talks about it most convincingly.

Time and Again (1951)

Like so many other fairy tales, I thought it was a horror story.

Cemetery World (1973)

Individualists would have little use for a device which would make them understand one another, for they would not care whether they understood one another.

City (1952)

I have tried at times to place humans in perspective against the vastness of universal time and space.

Without consciousness and intelligence, the universe would lack meaning.

Highway of Eternity (1986)

“It wouldn’t be the truth,” said Sutton.
“That,” said Trevor, “doesn’t have a thing to do with it.”

Time and Again (1951)

You either obey a law or you forfeit it. You can’t forget it with one breath and invoke it with the next.

Time and Again (1951)

It's not the machine itself that does the trick. The machine merely acts as an intermediary between the sensitive and the spiritual force.

Way Station (1963)

They are worse than the disinherited. They are not the has-beens, they are the never-weres.

Time and Again (1951)

Here was the very negation of life and motion, here was the stark, bald beginning when there was no life, nor even thought of life.

Time and Again (1951)

You do not understand what happens in war—a sort of sublime madness, an unholy hatred that is twisted into an unreasoning sense of righteousness…

Cemetery World (1973)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Clifford D. Simak (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.